Adventures in Baseball Archeology: the Negro Leagues, Latin American baseball, J-ball, the minors, the 19th century, and other hidden, overlooked, or unknown corners of baseball history...with occasional forays into other sports.

September 9, 2009

central park, pittsburgh 1920-25

Recently, during the Jerry Malloy Negro Leagues Conference in Pittsburgh, an historical marker was dedicated on the site of Greenlee Field, 1930s home of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. Admittedly it’s hard to distill historical significance into two or three sentences pithy enough to fit on a marker. And Greenlee Field was certainly of historical significance.

But the statement that it “was the first African American owned stadium in the Negro Leagues” is a specific, verifiable claim. And like so much else that we hear about Negro league history (or baseball history in general), in the end this claim comes from information that has been recycled again and again, getting slightly garbled in the transmission, without anyone going back to check it out.

In actuality the historical marker carries a shortened version of a longer claim that can be found at both Wikipedia and the Negro League Baseball Players Association: that Greenlee Field “was the first black-built and black-owned major league baseball field in the United States” (emphasis mine). But at least two other Negro league parks were “black-built” (meaning built on the initiative of African American club owners or other businessmen), at least as far as contemporary newspaper accounts indicated. These were Stars’ Park in St. Louis (built in 1922) and Central Park in Pittsburgh (built in 1920, home of the Keystones). Greenlee Field, in other words, was not even the first “black-built and black-owned” park in its own city.

Central Park (also known as Keystone Park or Chauncey Street Park) was the brainchild of Alexander McDonald “Don” Williams (1883-1941), a Barbadian immigrant who had settled in the United States sometime around the turn of the century. In 1914 he started a billiard hall in the basement of Burke’s Theater, and within a few years had decided to enter the city’s burgeoning independent baseball market. He built Central Park in late summer 1920. Its first tenant was Sell Hall’s American Giants, also known as the “Green Stockings” or “Green Socks.” In 1921 Williams founded his own team, the Pittsburgh Keystones, hired Dizzy Dismukes as player-manager, and in 1922 entered them in the Negro National League.

The club was not a success, however; the Keystones finished seventh (10-21) and folded, Williams lost his savings, and by 1924 he had sold the park to Sell Hall. The independent baseball scene in Pittsburgh suffered rough times in 1925. Central Park was sold again and turned into a “summer dancing pavilion.” As Pittsburgh Courier editor William G. Nunn put it, “[W]here the shouts of the diamond enthusiast once held sway the shrill chatter of the modern jazz-crazed youth will be heard” (“The Passing of Central Park,” June 27, 1925). Williams’s small stadium thus enjoyed an even shorter life span (1920-25) than Greenlee Field (1932-38).

Greenlee Field was in every way more successful than Central Park, of course. It was almost certainly better funded and constructed, with better grandstands and locker rooms and a larger capacity. Of course it hosted one of the greatest teams in baseball history, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, while Central Park witnessed only one rather dismal season of Negro National League baseball in 1922. Nevertheless it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten entirely.

I haven’t so far been able to find a street address for Central Park. According to the Pittsburgh Post (August 21, 1921), it was located at “Wylie Avenue and Chauncey Street.” Courier columnist John L. Clark wrote (January 21, 1961) that Central Park had been situated on “the plot of ground at the rear of Wylie Ave., extending from Chauncey to Junilla Sts.”

Looking at Google Maps I’m persuaded that Central Park must have been south of Wylie Avenue between Chauncey and Junilla—and in fact, there is what looks a vacant lot ringed by trees (making a suspiciously diamond-shaped clearing, I might add), currently bounded by Chauncey Street, Humber Way, and Jacobus Way. Obviously some real research into county and/or city records would nail down the old ballpark’s exact whereabouts for sure, but for now I’ve made a Google Map showing the definite locations of Greenlee Field and Ammon Field (another important park for black baseball in 1920s and 1930s Pittsburgh—see below), along with the hypothetical location of Central Park. (Click on the blue markers for notes on each location.)

Ammon Field, at 2217 Bedford Ave., has been listed in some sources (for example Wikipedia) as the Keystones’ home in 1922. This is definitely not accurate, and for what it’s worth the phrase “Ammon Field” turns up for the first time in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1928, when it served as the home for early versions of the Crawfords and for an independent team called the Pittsburgh Monarchs. The field has recently been refurbished and rededicated as Josh Gibson Field, which seems apt as it was the site of many of Gibson’s earliest professional appearances.

I found Central Amusement Park in the G. M. Hopkins Company Maps Collection, through the Historic Pittsburgh website. It's in Plate 22 B of the 1923 map. The URL is beastly long, but to find the map, go to the Historic Pittsburgh Map Collection website: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/maps
From there, select the G. M. Hopkins Company Maps. Scroll down to "Real estate plat-book of the city of Pittsburgh," Volume I [1923]. Open up the link to "all plates" and select 22B. You'll find the park southeast of the intersection of Wylie and Chauncey. An added bonus: the map shows the grandstand footprint, so we know how the field was oriented on the site! If you haven't used the Historic Pittsburgh Maps collection before, you are in for a treat!

In June, I found a stash of aerial and ground photographs of Greenlee Field, taken in 1938 by the architects who were preparing to demolish the ballpark to build the Bedford Dwellings housing project. The photographs will all be featured in a "biography" of Greenlee Field in the next issue of "Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal." One aerial image clearly shows both Ammon Field and Greenlee Field, including the orientation of the diamonds on the sites. I also see the vestiges of what could have been a diamond in the northwest corner of the block bordered by Junilla (west), Webster (north), Chauncey (east) and Wylie (south). To see where Greenlee Field once was, look at a current Google Earth or other satellite map. The field occupied the block north of Bedford between Junilla and Watt Street (not Watt Lane). Look for the fanned-out pattern of four buildings on the northeastern part of the lot--they were built directly on the original playing field. Another tidbit--Greenlee Field was also designed by a black architect. I talk about him in the article.

If you use the maps feature in Microsoft's Bing search engine, you not only can get the overhead view that Google Maps has, but a bird's eye view (like looking out of a plane downward at 45 degrees) from North, South, East and West directions. Unfortunately, the Central Park location looks less like a former ball field from these views.